The Runaway General

[Jan Klimkowski]

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough - a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.

McChrystal likes to style himself a man of honour, a soldier's soldier. In fact he craves power, and his actions show that he believes his own personal version of the End justifies whatever Means he, Stan Superman McChrystal, declares acceptable.

He has no honour.

McChrystal's "big philosophy", COIN, betrays the intellectual insight of a High School frat boy with a badass, I'm right even when I'm wrong attitude, and which can't understand why the Afghans don't want Yank puppets to run and "improve" their country. His comment that "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," is deeply condescending and borderline racist.

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan - and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says.

Plus McChrystal is from the dark side of torture and assassination squads. Or perhaps we should use the proper term: death squads.

Unfortunately, McChrystal will now probably end up running a Blackwater/Xe/Manchurian Global operation, either off the books or sub-contracted through cutouts. He'll be happy. He can go back to pretending to be a soldier.